Turtle Wax is a leading global car care brand with over 75 years of expertise in the industry. Starting out in Chicago and growing a loyal customer base in the US, Turtle Wax have expanded internationally and gained success in more than 120 countries.

As the first-ever company to launch bottled car wax back in 1946, Turtle Wax have become synonymous with innovative, high quality car care products. The brand is in a unique position in today’s market having witnessed decades of large scale developments within the automotive field. Despite the fast growth and development in the industry, Turtle Wax have remained ahead of the curve, creating products that resonate with modern audiences.

Turtle Wax are a long-standing client working with us on influencer outreach campaigns, social media strategy, and paid media advertising.

Turtle Wax approached our Paid Advertising team with the ambition of increasing their online sales. As brands begin to accommodate changing consumer habits, Turtle Wax wanted to review their eCommerce strategy in order to recover and grow in the post-pandemic landscape.

Turtle Wax liked our commercially driven approach and focus on performance-heavy campaigns. We agreed to an initial period of three months of Paid Advertising during winter, a low season for car care products, to measure the real impact of our campaigns. We set goals for each month, using specific metrics, including transactions and revenue, to easily track the progress.

Additionally, Turtle Wax also wanted to continue to build on its brand awareness in the UK, which was still relatively low compared to their status in the US. Our Paid Advertising campaigns are the ideal solution for driving sales as well as building brand awareness, as they can help maintain and gain visibility on Google. We planned to split budgets 80:20 across conversion-focused Performance Max campaigns and brand building campaigns.

Accurate conversion tracking is essential to understanding the success of a Paid Advertising campaign. To ensure that we produce accurate data, we audited Turtle Wax’s conversion tracking during the early stages.

We cross-checked the quality of our tracking against Google Analytics and Shopify data to see if any transactions were double counted. We escalated this task with a tracking expert to accurately identify underlying tracking issues ahead of reporting for the first full month of activity.

Correct product feed setup is crucial for ensuring effective paid media budget spend. During our setup for Turtle Wax, we noticed that their products didn’t always come through the Shopify feed properly, losing money for the client.

As we manage the Shopify account for Turtle Wax, we were able to inspect their Shopify settings and action changes rapidly. We set all products to pull from Shopify to Google Ads, resolving the issue. After we rectified this, we started seeing significant improvements in conversions, minimising the negative impact caused by the error that we spotted.

In collaboration with our content team, we optimised the Turtle Wax ad copy to appeal to their target audience of car detailers.

To make sure that we're saying the right things to the right people, we watched video reviews and influencer demos of Turtle Wax products and went through comments under the content to help inform our ad copywriting. This strategy helped us to understand how the end users talk and what appeals to them. We were then able to use the same language, translating industry talk and terminology into concise and targeted ad copy.

We are able to bring in results from the first month of Paid Advertising because we take a lot of care to use the data and behaviours we see.

Algorithm data is key to understanding the user base you’re targeting. With Turtle Wax, we didn’t have any existing algorithm data and only three months to prove that Paid Advertising works for them. Without historical data, we didn’t have the ability to rely on this information and had to be agile to make our strategy work.

We opted for short testing periods and acted quickly to make changes. Side by side testing isn’t always recommended because of the lack of historical data to back up the changes but we utilised the method to our advantage.
We learned from our ads copy, audiences and bidding in the first few weeks. We kept a close eye on audience signals, matching them to what we promote. We also utilised first-party data to help the algorithm learn what sort of audiences we want to target.